For four years, scientists have been on an international race to exploit a property of a peculiar kind of light called an “Airy beam”. Now, not one, but two groups of researchers are laying claim to the prize.

If Advanced Micro Devices was thinking it had a shot of delivering GPU coprocessors to supercomputer maker Cray - which already uses its Opteron chips in its HPC clusters - the odds just went down. Former Cray chief technology officer Steve Scott, who spent 19 years designing machines and interconnects, has just been tapped as the new CTO for Nvidia's Tesla GPU coprocessor products for workstations and servers.

Comment
We have had a flash of insight: all the storage array vendors are going to have to face up to all-flash arrays and do something about the technology – buy, partner or build. Denial is not a strategy.

Analysis
Quite unexpectedly I found myself in possession of some very hot, illegal property last week. Not a looted plasma TV but rather the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1, which thanks to legal injunctions is disappearing from channels all over Europe. Vodafone is the latest to cancel its orders.

Time-rich computer scientists in America say they have conclusive proof that online encyclopedia/graffiti archive Wikipedia is biased against women. Hardly any of the site's legions of volunteer editors are female, and the few who are get picked on by the male majority: as a result Wikipedia fails to provide quality in-depth information on subjects of interest to women – such as "friendship bracelets or Sex and the City".

Cisco's former UK reseller and distie boss Bernadette Wightman has returned to the channel less than three months after taking on a global role with the vendor to head up the Cloud Centre of Excellence.

While Samsung is seeking to overturn a preliminary injunction that prohibits it from shipping its hotly anticipated Galaxy Tab 10.1 in Europe, a court in The Hague decided not to impose an immediate sales ban in the Netherlands until it reaches a decision on 15 September.

Geek Treat of the Week
You don’t have to be a geek to have a fondness for a gadget that just ‘works’. Perhaps a mobile phone that does bugger all than manage calls but gets a signal wherever you are. How about a simple pair of headphones? From a technical standpoint, perhaps not so simple in the case of Audio Technica’s ATH-ANC7b cans. However, just one switch activates the QuietPoint noise-cancelling signal processing, and the roaring silence is upon you. Yup, that’s it.

Google has made its largest-ever acquisition, and biggest corporate gamble, by splashing out $12.5bn for Motorola's phone division, Motorola Mobility. The deal puts Google into the hardware business in a serious way – and into direct competition with licensees of its Android operating system, who woke up this morning thinking they were Google's business partners.

With the launch of Microsoft's Windows Phone 7.5 fast approaching, it was only a matter of time before someone leaked the final build. An internal spillage has done exactly that, offering hackers the chance to give Mango a ruddy good seeing too.

Virgin Media isn't in the TV content business anymore. Today the cable operator confirmed it has a buyer for its share of the UKTV company, for £239m plus £100m to buy up outstanding debt and equity. The buyer is US company Scripps Networks Interactive, responsible for the Food Network.

Review
Last year’s Mac Mini was a bit of a let-down. Sure, it got a nice redesign, with a gleaming metallic, low-profile chassis and a new HDMI port that seemed like a belated attempt to try and repurpose the Mini as a media centre system. However, the hardware inside it was actually downgraded, which meant that you were paying almost £650 for a low-spec desktop Mac that didn’t even include a mouse and keyboard, let alone a monitor.

Analysis
It's all about patents, says Google co-founder and CEO Larry Page. Google insists that it bought Motorola to shore up its Android platform, which is caught in a litigious pincer movement from old buddies Steve Jobs and Larry Ellison. Microsoft is merely egging them on the sidelines as the manbags fly, shouting: "Fight!"

Hacktivists protested recent controversial actions taken by a San Francisco regional subway authority by publishing sensitive information for more than 2,000 of passengers who had nothing to do with its agency's management.

Xsigo Systems, which for years has been trying to carve a niche for itself in the virtualized network and server rackets, is taking another crack at it with a version of its VP family of I/O Directors, tweaked to provide direct and movable links between virtual machines on clustered servers.

The search for intelligent life somewhere other than among non-governmental homo sapiens has been given a reprieve. Thanks to private donations, the SETI Institute will soon resume scanning the skies for extraterrestrial signals.

In the summer of 2008, Google flipped the switch on its App Engine, letting outside developers build applications atop its state-of-the-art online infrastructure – and it soon got a lecture from Jason Hoffman.